Opponents of U.S. military action in Syria protest Saturday at New York's Times Square. / Craig Ruttle, AP

by DeWayne Wickham, USATODAY

by DeWayne Wickham, USATODAY

As horrific as the death count is from the sarin-filled bombs that the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad allegedly hurled into a rebel stronghold on the edge of Damascus, it should not trigger a U.S. military intervention into Syria's two-and-a-half-year-old civil war.

Yes, the 426 children killed by the use of a weapon of mass destruction -- which most of the world agrees is an unacceptable means of meting out death -- is a chilling reminder of the indiscriminate brutality of war. But in a conflict in which both sides are accused of committing gruesome war crimes, President Obama should not let himself be bamboozled into plunging this nation down another Middle East rabbit hole.

He shouldn't be hoodwinked into believing that a U.S. military action to "punish" Assad's forces is in this country's national interest. Some of the strongest factions aligned against Assad's regime have links to al-Qaeda, which is waging a worldwide terrorist campaign against us.

If the forces trying to topple Assad prevail, Syria could become the world's first al-Qaeda-led nation -- an outcome that would almost certainly draw large numbers of U.S. ground forces back onto a Middle East battle zone. Avoiding that outcome is in this country's national interest.

Syria is the fault line of the long-running conflict between Israel and Iran. For many backers of Israel, Assad's government is widely seen as a pariah because it is an ally of the mullahs in Iran who clamor for Israel's destruction. Israel's supporters inside the Obama administration and Congress, I suspect, see the sarin attack as an opportunity to use the American military to undermine Assad's hold on power.

"I think Israel wants the Syrian civil war to continue" by weakening Assad's forces, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli government official who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Israel wants "a bigger U.S. military footprint in the Middle East" because a "muscular, interventionist America is more useful to Israel than an America that is focused on state-building at home."

Israeli leaders believe that getting the U.S. to attack Syria will send a message to Iran that the U.S. is serious when it says it will not allow Tehran to develop a nuclear weapon, Levy told me.

But as commander in chief, Obama's decision on military intervention should be guided by what's in this country's best interests -- not by what's in the best interest of Israel.

An American military attack against Assad will strengthen the hand of those who seek to turn Syria into an Islamic state. And if that happens, neighboring Jordan will almost certainly fall to a jihadist movement. The tumbling of those dominoes as a result of an ill-conceived U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war would also bring down Iraq's government. Nearly 4,500 American servicemen and women died to create a democracy in that Middle Eastern country, which is wedged between Iran, Syria and Jordan. But that fledgling government might not survive if it is surrounded by militant Islamic states.

The government officials responsible for the sarin gas attack -- like the rebel leaders behind the reported beheadings and summary executions of Syrian government soldiers -- should be branded war criminals, hunted down and hauled before the International Criminal Court.

But when our national interests -- and the safety of many Americans -- would be put at risk, the Obama administration shouldn't give in to pressures to take sides in a civil war in which war crimes are being committed by both sides.

In Syria's civil war, there is no moral high ground. There is only the quicksand of a wider Middle East conflict that the U.S. must carefully navigate.